A box arrived. It was delivered by Royal Mail, and the label on the front was curiously devoid of name. The address was accurate to the post code, and had been written by someone with a tidy hand. The edge of the label was adorned with the branding of a popular vodka based alcopop, and this is why the other residents had presumed it was for me.
The package was about the weight of three bottles of vodka, or at the worst, the weight of three large bottles of vodka based alcopop. The package was about 12 inches square, and three inches deep, so was about the right size for three snug, snoozing bottles. I set about the sellotape securing the corrugated cardboard box with obvious gusto. I was keen to discover why an unidentified party affiliated with a vodka based alcopop was sending me presents, and what presents they were sending me for the identifiable reason. Maybe I had drank enough bottles of the alcopop in question to earn some reward gift on their loyalty scheme and to forget about the whole affair by the morning after the consumption had taken place.
I was a bit disappointed to find that the box was not crammed with booze. It was not jammed with booze tokens or booze vouchers. It was inexplicably stuffed with thin square cardboard sandwiches, each individually shrink-wrapped in plastic. At the heart of each sandwich was a black vinyl discs. I put a few discs on a turntable and dropped a needle on the spiral track in the surface. The discs were 12 inch singles for the lover of funk and mellow grooves. Not to my tastes at all – it all acid skiffle to me. I was bitterly disappointed, until I spotted a price tag on the front of one of the singles. I looked at some more, and with a bit of arithmetic figured out that I was for no apparent reason, the proud owner of 180 quids worth of vinyl. Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to eBay I go. No reasonable offer refused.